Numerous attempts have been made over the years to devise apparatus that will facilitate the formation of a rope of sausages about a smoke stick on a high speed, production line basis. The smoke stick, with its ropes, or festoons of sausages, is removed from the apparatus for further processing in a smoke room in a meat processing plant. In view of the huge quantities of sausages, and the diverse types of such product, a high speed, sanitary and efficient apparatus for coiling sausages is assured to significant commercial acceptance.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,087,673, granted July 20, 1937 to C. Lisberg, discloses a sausage coiling machine employing a collapsible reel including toggle arms 24, 33 and spring 37 for biasing the arms away from central shaft 19. When detent 47 is released, the spring expands and the winding bars 30, 46 collapse inwardly toward shaft 19, as shown in FIG. 1. A smoke stick 27 is secured to one of the winding bars.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,995,312, granted Aug. 8, 1961 to Erwin Nagel, also discloses a sausage coiling machine employing a collapsible reel. A sausage guide 22 is slidably supported upon bars 20, 21 and feeds the sausage to the smoke stick 68 retained on the reel, as shown in FIG. 2.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,781,988, granted Feb. 19, 1957 to Carl H. Peschke, discloses a sausage coiling machine utilizing a reel comprising a pair of parallel rods 4, 4a, equally and oppositely spaced from the reel axis, and a pair of supports 8, 12 for the rod extremities. One of the rods is pivotally mounted on one of the supports, and has a latch connection to the other, whereby the rod may be swung from its normal position to facilitate removal of a sausage coil from the reel. By virtue of slots 18 and headed bolts 17, the rods and their mountings may be adjusted to, and from, the axis of the reel so that a desired number of sausage links may extend between the two rods.
While the winding machine described in the Peschke patent possesses greater versatility for handling different sausages lengths than the collapsible reels, the adjustments are rather cumbersome and time consuming to effectuate. Also, the adjustments require manual adjustments, and this may present a sanitary problem since one is dealing with food products.